In Other News

• Japan’s National Printing Bureau has started producing new 10,000 yen banknotes, which are expected to enter circulation in the first half of 2024. A special ceremony was held to mark the start of production, attended by Finance Minister Aso Taro.

The new note features Shibusawa Eiichi, a famed industrialist in modern Japan. He is known as the ‘father of Japanese capitalism.’ The reverse side features the Tokyo Station building.

According to the Finance Minister, the banknote is the first to incorporate a new kind of hologram to make it difficult to counterfeit. From the images of the note, it would appear the hologram is a stereogram – in which the portrait appears to move three-dimensionally when rotated about a vertical axis, displaying the tell-tale motion parallax and stereopsis associated with stereograms. If this is the case, then it would indeed be the first banknote to feature the technology.